First orange!

[u/Crystallized-matter]

Found my first orange and it’s also cadmium and glows under black light! Also found this cool yellow golden color too!

[u/Clear_Spirit4017]

Looks orange to me. The chart a poster included is interesting and helpful.

[u/Financial_Daikon_640]

But is it truly orange? I’m absolutely not trying to crush your celebration—I’m just not completely convinced.

In my own sea-glass collecting, brown is by far the most common color I find. I have a much larger collection than yours, but interestingly, the overall ratio of colors seems pretty similar. Brown still dominates by a huge margin.

I’ve collected so much brown glass that I eventually started separating it into piles based on the different shades of brown. I’ve done the same thing with greens. What that taught me is that many of those apparent “different colors” aren’t necessarily different colored bottles at all.

A lot of the variation comes from where on the original bottle the piece came from. Thicker areas of glass tend to produce much deeper, richer colors, while thinner sections appear considerably lighter. Depending on the size and construction of the original bottle, you can end up with a surprisingly wide range of shades from essentially the same brown glass.

Then there are pieces where thickness, shape, weathering, and the way the glass has fractured during its long journey toward becoming sand can create colors that are genuinely difficult to classify.

That’s why, looking at your piece, I’d personally suspect it may have originated from a particularly thick portion of a brown bottle of unknown size before I’d assume it was genuinely rare orange glass.

That certainly doesn’t mean it isn’t orange. Considering the enormous number of bottles that have existed and ended up in the ocean, a truly orange piece landing at your feet is absolutely possible.

And after admitting the ridiculous depths I’ve gone to organizing my own hoard, I’ll also say this: it’s your collection, and ultimately it should be seen through your eyes.

Either way, you have a fine collection and that is a remarkable find. Congratulations, and good luck with everything still out there waiting to be discovered.

Keep hunting. In the end, it’s not always what we find that matters most—it’s who we’re with during the journey to find it.

Edit:after posting i found posts related to my comment as well as a nice chart for reference. Reposting found chart here.

[u/Crystallized-matter → u/Financial_Daikon_640]

My collection is much larger than this, this was just from one trip! But I get what you’re saying. I think it’s true orange due to the fact that it’s also cadmium glass and glows bright orange under black light and it’s very uncommon for that to be brown and much more common in red, orange, and yellow. In person it’s much more orange color too, so hard to capture true colors with iPhone cameras lol.